Women In Chains
by Smidgie
Summary: Moments in the lives of Hades, Persephone, and their lover. PersephoneHadesMenthe. Quirky themes. Formerly 'Perfection'. Chapter five up: the culmination of Hades and Menthe's love affair.
1. Perfection

Hades, Persephone, and the rest of anything related to ancient Greece here fore and therefore belong to the ancient Greeks. However, since they are notably ancient and therefore unlikely to be alive, perhaps no disclaimer is necessary.

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He waits. watches. hopes. prays.

Waits – for the inevitable. She would never change.

Watches – for some minute sign. She is his master when it comes to subtlety.

Hopes – that today will be different. But things with her are always the same.

Prays – although his prayers are long unanswered. He's not even sure whom he prays to.

How well he remembers.

The silken waterfall of her hair, the glittering coals of her eyes that smouldered like the banked embers of a forest fire – he remembers beauty, when he thinks of her, when he does not weep at the thought of the exquisite madwoman who is all his creation. He remembers love, lust, betrayal – and the sickening sensation of defeat, which he often compares to drowning in a pit of snakes, or dancing with the Minotaur, or her kiss.

Oh, he remembers her, remembers her beauty and her smiles, and the lies behind her eyes, and sometimes when he remembers her, when his bed is cold and he knows hers is not, he remembers her and wishes he could forget.

She is still proud, he muses as he watches her. He cannot take his eyes off her; he never could, when around her, except for when her own were on him. But she fascinates him, draws him in with the smallest details, like the curve of an artlessly graceful fingertip or the determined tilt of her chin. No, none of it is determination, for she is a creature of pure pride, and that masquerades as everything else. She could never love anyone as much as she loves herself, he knows, and that is the torment of it. She is too proud to break. He smiles, mirthlessly. He knows he is none to talk of pride. A true princess, he had wanted, a creature so perfect that all who saw her would fall in love with her. As he had.

What he had never counted on was that the princess, the porcelain-perfect princess, might fall in love with him too. That his corruption would lead to her own. And that through the stains of his vices she found her own, and that even as those sins consume her she is the most perfect creature he had ever seen. He has become a prisoner in his own dungeon, a loser of his own game. And now, this is how the pride ends.

She lives in a suite of rooms all her own, and he avoids them if he can. It is hers, all hers, and the only thing in that room that belongs to him is the massive bronzed mirror set into the wall, a mirror that through some trick of the Fates is a window from his side and a mirror from hers. He can sit and watch her, revel in her perfection without having to have his mind slowly penetrated under the weight of that slow burning stare. But she always knows he is there. She just doesn't know where he is.

Today she is dressed in a gown the colour of night, a bleak contrast against skin that no longer sees the light of the sun. She wanders through the twisted maze that is the suite of rooms created for her. It was no great commission, to have it built. He commands a realm of damned souls, after all. Such a warped design is easy to come by, and she likes it. It is perfect to her in its hulking monstrosity, like a great squatting toad hovering over a little, poisonous fly.

Perfection. He can remember his lust for it, his consuming desire to have the perfect wife, if he could not himself be anything remotely resembling flawlessness. But perfection has become little more than yet another great burden he carries on his shoulders, adding to those already there. She has taken away his joy at the sight of a well-crafted flower, a bright-winged butterfly, but then again, he has taken away her life, leaving her sanity in tattered ruins. He thinks that perhaps this is despair, this feeling of ironic justice and love all bound up in heartaches. She had been perfect – all gilt and lace and silk – before he wed her, before he had welcomed her into his bed and into the chaos of his world. Her light had been consumed by darkness as she abated the black despairs that had tormented him. She had absorbed the tears and fears into herself, martyring her pretty soul on the flames of his self-loathing, and she no longer illuminates his darkness.

She creates it.

He cannot grieve for her; to grieve and to move on would be to dissociate himself from her, and he cannot do that. For all she creates the darkness that wraps him up in a living shroud, he had created her, made her a broken doll he could not fix.

And he knows he deserves it.

_xx_

He enters the room.

Her voice is light, sweet, when the door swishes upon. She does not need to look up to know who it is. Only he comes here now. She does not look at him when she greets him. He reciprocates. He inquires as to her health. She gives him a polite non-answer.

She does not ask him back. She does not care for his health. She would prefer it if he were dead.

He sets up the chessboard, as is their custom. He is white, she is black. The ritual they crafted to avoid the arguments does not deviate. All the better. He would have been lost without the familiarity of routine to fall back on, to focus on rather than meet those burning embers that are her eyes.

She had painted the white queen red. He does not ask why. He knows she knows. He moves first.

Her eyes follow his move, catching alight. She matches every move he makes. He steals a pawn. She takes his as a replacement. Her lips are straight, but her lowered lashes are laughing.

He puts her in check.

Her eyes flare, banked coals suddenly burning anew with the oxygen that is carried on the wind, and a bishop is gone before he can blink. He is not surprised.

She has never enjoyed being threatened, after all.

She breaks the silence first. "Who is she?" Her voice is emotionless. His chest aches, but he knows it is not his heart that throbs beneath the silk of his shirt. It cannot hurt if it is dead.

The ritual is a trembling, ever present entity between them as they stray away from the path they constructed long ago. It does not like it when She and He do not do as It wishes.

"Who?" he asks. Anger creases her white brow.

"Do not lie to me. I can smell her on you." Her gaze shifts and flicks like lightning onto his face. He is disconcerted, as ever. He does not know how to respond when she looks at him like she still expects him to change.

He sighs, and moves his knight. He no longer pays attention to the chess, instead watching his wife. _His queen._ Oh, by the gods, how it hurts to own her. How it hurts to love her.

"Menthe," he says quietly, as though lowering his voice will soften the blow. Her fingers move a rook, and he notes they are not shaking like his own. But she never has shown weakness before, so why now?

"My own lady in waiting." A smile that was not a smile, and did not want to be. "Odd. I would not have thought her to be to your taste."

"Why?" The word feels awkward, defensive, on his lips. She smiles at his discomfort, but that twist of the lips, he feels, should not be called a smile. It resembles too much a snarl.

"She is not perfect." A slam, and another. She has taken his queen. Her own stands where it used to be. "And we both know how you prize perfection." He hears the words she does not say: _how you prize perfection, how you prize me._

"Stop." The word is dragged from his lips. "Stop."

"No." Her gaze is black, unyielding. "The game can continue without a queen, you know." The flat absence of emotion in her eyes reminds him of what he does to her, and he is suddenly aware that his game has been continuing without his queen for a long, long time. She takes his bishop, watching him with half-lidded eyes. "You can survive the loss of your queen, my lord. But I would watch out for your other pieces, if I were you."

"Kore…"

"Do not," she snaps. "My name is Persephone, Hades. Do not even dare." He looks away from the sudden flash of something that is not that dead stare in her eyes. It is the first time she has called him by his name in years, and she still says his name the same way. The pieces blur before him when he blinks, and the salt stings his eyes. Or is that just the bitterness?

She has him in check. He moves his king.

She always has him on the defensive.

"So, Menthe," she begins calmly, and the anguish which he thought he had seen only moments ago was gone. "Lovely girl. Young. Pretty, isn't she?" He shifts in his seat.

"Come to your point, wife." She smiles, a real, honest smile, _and I love you, oh gods how I love you Kore, my queen, my wife, you are my reason, and I am dying without you – _The quirk of her lips dies and he falls out of love with her again. At least, until the next smile.

It still hurts as much as the first time.

"No point, husband. None at all." Her eyes glitter with some unknown emotion, but it is not hatred. She does not have enough emotion left in her for hatred. She moves her queen.

"Checkmate." He stares.

How could he miss that? A simple trap, naught but a queen and a rook pinning him in place. He surveys the board, his king sitting trapped amidst a forest of his own pieces. The irony chokes him as he forces a smile, and he is dying in front of her, dying under the weight of her eyes that are cold but yet burn.

"Another good game, my wife," he says finally, after inspecting the board for any possible way out. She inclines her head, frozen eyes on him

"It was," she says at last, as he extends a pale finger to knock over his king.

The sound echoes long after the piece stops moving, and there is something new in her eyes that he cannot define. But it makes him run away from her, from that terrible accusation that is not accusation at all.

He leaves the room, exhausted, and glanced back one last time. Her back is straight, her feature like porcelain and as perfect as a statue.

He turns his face away.

His emotions are still chaotic hours later, sitting in a little used library with his head in his hands, when a pair of arms wrap around his neck. "Come to bed?" a voice purrs, and he turns to meet her embrace. He studies her, dark eyes intent, trying to find the flaws in her he knows are there.

Menthe's eyes are a little too close together.

Her lips are a little too big.

Her nose a little too wide.

He remembers his wife, his queen, and the expression in her eyes when she knew he was bedding her former maid. Kore is cold now, a frozen statue of marble and glass, and she would never be warm again. Menthe, on the other hand…

She is not perfect.

But sometimes, imperfection would simply have to do.

_xx_

The woman examines the chessboard, eyes alight with a painful knowledge that defied the silver drops that fell from her eyes. He is so accustomed to her being right, she knows, but for once she would like him to just look a little deeper, to not be in such a rush to get away from her and back to his little harlots.

There is a path out of the checkmate, clear as day, but he is too accustomed to her being right to question her.

She smiles a not-smile and turns away to pace the confines of her cage with restless energy.

He would never know she was bluffing the entire time.

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	2. All The Difference

Disclaimer: Hades, Persephone, and the rest of anything related to ancient Greece herefore and therefore belong to the ancient Greeks. However, since they are notably ancient and therefore unlikely to be alive, perhaps no disclaimer is necessary.

Thanks to lucy, Black Rose Writing, Furgle, shoster, one mourning dove, bamboo shoots, and JudgeandJury for their lovely reviews for 'Perfection'. I really appreciate your feedback.

Incidentally, I'd also like to thank the one hundred and seventy eight people who read 'The Chrysippus Complex'. I find it curious that so many people read it... and not a single one had the decency to leave a review. Even if you hate my stories, at least tell me about it, so I know what to improve on.

Besides, you don't want review karma to get you, do you? :)

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So what if Hades was cold and clammy to touch, and his lips were freezing when he pressed them against hers, and his hair was too long and threaded with little beads made of bone? She could be the lover of Priapus, or Zeus – she remembered the fate of the last few girls who dallied with Hera's husband. They generally ended up dead or turned into inanimate objects. Menthe did not want to go down that route.

All in all, she didn't mind it.

There were worse positions in the world than the temporary lover of the lord of death.

_xx_

So what if Persephone mutilated her with hand scissors, and her eyes were the colour of flames when she pressed her soft lips against Menthe's own, and she was the most terrifying woman Menthe had ever seen? She could be starving, or tortured… oh, wait, she thought without sarcasm. She was starving. She was tortured. Menthe would do anything to not go down this route… even service Persephone like a whore.

All in all, she didn't have the option of minding it.

There were few worse positions in the world than the permanent lover of the queen of the underworld.


	3. Among The Flowers She Once Wore

Hades, Persephone, and the rest of anything related to ancient Greece here fore and therefore belong to the ancient Greeks. However, since they are notably ancient and therefore unlikely to be alive, perhaps no disclaimer is necessary.

* * *

She is in the garden.

How she got into the garden he will never know, for he locks the doors to her suite of rooms himself, and only he has the key. But she is out in the garden now, the weak underworld light spilling over her hair and illuminating exactly how pale she has become.

And Menthe is beside her. He is not angry to see them both together, the cool, immovable queen of the damned and the recklessly energetic little nymph who reminds him of Kore before… before…

Well, she reminds him of someone he used to know. He supposes he should be content to leave it at that.

But they do not know their master can see them. At least, Menthe does not. He has a curious feeling that Kore is fully aware he is around, for they are so unnaturally attuned to one another after centuries of marriage that they can always tell when the other is near, even if they have not spoken to one another for a decade or two. But he is worried, a little, for Menthe's safety. He is not sure how sane his wife is, and if the masquerade that she has lost her mind is nothing but that: a masquerade, a show, a lie to torment him even further. Sometimes, he believes she is fully capable of such a trick, but mostly, he just believes she would not deceive him. He has to.

Either way, she is not stable. He can see that.

He is painfully aware of how beautiful his wife is, how treacherously lovely, and how capable she is of hiding her madness when she wishes to. He sees the way she talks to Menthe, her soft voice equally as animated as her bright eyes, and he knows the young nymph will fall under her spell, much as he did so very long ago.

If only Demeter was here to see this, he muses bitterly. If only Demeter was here to see the monster he has created of her only daughter.

When Menthe has left the queen, blue eyes shining with a brightness Kore's can never hope to rival, he joins his wife in the garden.

"You're out."

"Apparently."

They sit in quiet silence for a long, long time.

When she is finally content to leave, she stands, curtseying elegantly and mockingly, and something in Hades snaps.

He drags her back to her rooms by her hair.

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	4. Charisma

Hades, Persephone, and the rest of anything related to ancient Greece here fore and therefore belong to the ancient Greeks. However, since they are notably ancient and therefore unlikely to be alive, perhaps no disclaimer is necessary.

**Warning**: this contains adult gods and goddesses doing adult god and goddess things. This chapter is the sole reason the rating has gone up to M. Please, if you are easily offended or are a small child, go away before you read the poetical smut below. If not, however, enjoy something a little different from what I usually write in Greek mythology: angsty romance… with a happy ending! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have finally decided to cut Hades and Persephone some slack... for now... :)

* * *

He is all too aware of Kore's charisma, the unnatural and chilling power she had to seduce those around her, until she had wrapped them in her silvery charm like gilt-encrusted chains. It has long since ceased to work upon him, and he realises the many flaws of the queenly creature that inhabits the underworld with all the cold magnetism of a flawless jewel. Her eyes glitter, petrified wood almost black that was once a menagerie of honey and hazel, and he does not recognise her as the woman that he wed.

She is out of her cage today, dressing in their long uninhabited suite of rooms with all the calmness of the truly careless. It is one of the infrequent gatherings of the gods, and everyone is expected to make an appearance, even if the entire affair ends in Hephaestus melting Ares' helmet onto his head. He cannot quite reconcile the picture of his wife, sitting serenely amongst the rooms so recently filled with dust, pinning her coppery hair _– I nearly pulled it out by the roots, I'm so sorry, Kore, but I was so angry_ – with tiny pins shaped like flowers. They are no substitute for the real thing, but they glimmer with the most enchanting little multicoloured stones deep beneath the earth, and he had had them made for her a long time ago, when they still shared a bed.

At Olympus the gathering is as varied as it is extraordinary, and Hades marvels yet again at the diversity of his kin. As he sweeps through the doors into the meeting hall, Kore on his arm, he cannot help but enjoy the looks they are given as they enter. Regardless of Aphrodite, Kore is still one of the most beautiful women in the room, in all her dark glory, with her coppery hair falling down her ivory shoulders, and her dark eyes scanning the room. He knows who she is searching for – it has been only months since they have seen each other, but they miss one another regardless – before she swiftly leaves his side and moves across the room to her mother.

He can only watch her like this for a certain period of time without his heart burning, for her eyes light up and become that familiar hazel-honey colour they were so long ago. He distracts himself by examining his kin. Ares and Hephaestus are, as usual, scowling at one another from opposite positions across the room. _Pan is fascinated, _he thinks wryly, _by Aphrodite on his left, who is oblivious to both her husband's and Artemis' glare. She'll get herself shot if she doesn't leave Apollo alone. _

It's really just an affair for the gods to air grievances about one another, and it is blissfully short. He cannot quite stand the image of Hermes and Kore standing together, heads close, and he becomes nauseous when she tips back her head and laughs at his joke. Hades feels his mouth go dry, noticing against his will how the golden light gilds the alabaster skin above her dress's neckline. He resolves to find Menthe as soon as possible when they arrive home.

Home. Is there such a thing, with Kore? Or is there just another form of pugratory, worse than Tartarus, for no one knows it exists. In public Kore is all charm, the perfect and exquisite queen. They see nothing of the demented madwoman who tortured his lover and would happily do the same to him.

Her wicked charisma fools them all.

When they arrive back in the palace in the underworld, she disappears for an hour or two. He searches, but cannot find Menthe. Defeated, he retreats into a library and decides to stay there until his thoughts are in order and his wife is her usual cold and heartless self. When finally he can move without jealous visions of his queen and Hermes together overcoming him, he moves slowly, as would an old man, to his bedroom. The rooms are dark, the candles unlit, and the absence of the weak underworld light suggests nighttime above.

He slides into bed fully clothed, stopping only to tug off his boots, and shuts his eyes.

The door blows open.

He sits up, eyes trying to adjust to the darkness. A figure, slender yet curvaceous, crosses the threshold. He sighs in relief. "Menthe, my dear, I was afraid you wouldn't come – " A finger across his lips silences him, and he waits for her to speak, eyes slipping closed as her hands thread gently through his hair. When she speaks, his eyes snap open in horror.

"Did you really have that wench here in our wedding bed, Hades?"

It is Kore, a thousand curses upon her. The warm and willing creature tugging him down to bed is Kore, and as he numbly obeys her will his mind shrieks at him not to be drawn into her web again. She settles herself atop him, her nightgown gossamer soft and filmy against his skin as she draws his shirt off him.

"But…" He cannot think of what to say; she is doing that thing with her hips he so desperately wishes she were not because it makes it so terribly hard to think. "You said never again… not after the last time…"

"Well," she murmurs, helping him out of his trousers, "I changed my mind." The rage fills him again. She had said _never_, she had said _not in ten thousand years_ _will I change my mind, Hades, so don't you dare touch me ever again_, and he can tell she is smiling in the darkness, that quirk of the lips that is not a smile, that expression he hates.

Violently, he rips her hands off of him and rolls them, so her fragile, feminine little body is under him. Her eyes are wide and innocent and – _oh, by the stars_ – hazel and honey in the darkness. "Dominant as you may be, wife," he snarls as he tears the bodice of her dress open, "but you will obey me in our marriage bed, if nowhere else."

When they begin to move together, in that dance they have not done for so long but instinctively remember, he bites his lip to keep from speaking her name. He can tell she is doing the same; they do not kiss, for kissing is a lover's task, and they are no longer certain they love each other, if they ever did.

But she is her, she is so perfect, she is everything he has tried to forget and he cannot restrain himself any longer.

"Kore," he gasps out into the night, repeating her name like a prayer, and for once she does not correct him. She shudders beneath him, breathing fast, as though she cannot drag enough oxygen into her lungs.

"Hades," she replies, and he thrills to hear his name like that, panted out through moans and sighs of pleasure. "Hades," she repeats, and he is conscious of something taking hold in her. "Oh, Hades, my life, my lord, my _love_ – "

And then it is over, but just beginning, and somehow for the first time in what feels like millennia they are together, and whole, and he realises why he could never replicate this feeling with Menthe or any woman other than Kore. He loves her, he never stopped loving her, and as he comes down gently from the plateau he is conscious of a pair of little, feminine hands stroking his back. He meets her eyes; it is dark, but he can see her clearly in his mind.

"You said it," he breathes in astonishment. She meets his eyes squarely.

"Yes."

Something in him breaks at the single syllable. He draws her close to his, smothering his face in her throat, his sobs shaking them both. He feels her tiny hands on his back, stroking, comforting gently. He grips her too tightly, knowing there will be bruises on her immortal body in the morning, and he knows she will not care. She is his Kore again, and part of her will always still be that dreaded Persephone, but he feels that perhaps things will get a little better. "Kore," he murmurs against her. "Oh, Kore, love you, love you _so much_…" And through his tears she kisses him, holding him so close to her that he can feel the hummingbird heartbeat beneath her breast.

Later, he stares up at the ceiling, his queen draped over him like a particularly beautiful blanket, he cannot quite understand the way the world has tilted on its axis. There is so much that still needs to be worked out between them, so much he still needs to understand. What drove her to her retreat from the world, what brought her back, whether it would occur again… But for the moment, Hades decides he will simply revel in the presence of his wife next to him and the promise of the coming day.

Here, in the darkness with Kore, Hades recognises himself as a hypocrite. No matter what he lets himself believe, he is not immune to her charisma.

He is just like the rest of them. And, grinning foolishly as his wife presses herself closer to him in her sleep, he couldn't give a damn.

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	5. Woman In Flux

Hades, Persephone, and the rest of anything related to ancient Greece here fore and therefore belong to the ancient Greeks. However, since they are notably ancient and therefore unlikely to be alive, perhaps no disclaimer is necessary.

The culmination of Menthe's affair with Hades.

* * *

She is not quite sure of what has occurred.

Affairs in the castle beneath the ground rarely change; the rooms are always dark and gloomy, the servants as quiet as ghosts, and the lord and the queen as distant as earth and sky. She is aware that she is one of the rare changes wrought in the castle under the ground, a stone's throw in one direction from Tartarus and the same in the opposite direction to the Elysium Fields. She knows, that regardless of the movement of the living above and the dead around the castle, very little changes.

Persephone is always, always insane, a lovely and shadowy spectre as capable of putting on a show as she is of driving her husband to the brink of madness – _flawless creature of dark and destruction_ – and beyond. She is an airy, never truly solid presence, as beautiful as the day and as treacherous as the night, the terrifying queen of the dead. Hades, in turn, her beloved lord of the underworld, is always, always slavish to his wife's desires, but nevertheless seeking comfort in the embraces and arms of anyone else who will not refuse him entry to their bed. He is grounded, solid, immovable, unchangeable.

And she? She is the breath of fresh air in the cluttered and crowded prison of Persephone, the warm nymph slipping into Hades' bed instead of him crawling into her own. She is the sunset fire of the clouds in the world above, red and violet and gold, created as the earth clashes with the sky. She is the greenery that softens the earth and the wind that moves the air. Even as the agent of chaos, the catalyst of change, she is just another known variable in the castle beneath the earth, and defined by not herself but what she means to those around her. The castle's guest, the lord's – _whore _– mistress, Persephone's rival/lover/occasional companion. She has been the same since she arrived, and she feels that she will be the same when she leaves.

But everything is different now. Everything has changed.

She paces the familiar halls, the lord and the queen's throne room, the dungeons and the towers, stretching up to kiss the earth. Lost in her own thoughts – for those of others rarely trouble her – the discrepancies become more and more obvious as she roams further away from her corner of this shifting and ever-the-same world.

The rooms of the castle below the ground are aglow, brightly lit up, and servants scurry from corridor to corridor, their voices discussing every possible scenario as to why they have been ordered to bring the light back in. they let her pass without word, for all know she is the master's – _whore_ – companion. She is disassociated, alienated from her surroundings. The dim and gloomy castle of the realm beneath the earth is gone, replaced by a palace fit for the queen of the spring. Only the lack of windows tells the truths of the castle – _ever-dungeon, always-oubliette _– only the lack of windows, and the shades that drift like the souls of the lost.

Most curious of all is that the lord and the queen are nowhere to be seen. This puzzles her more than the light and the noise and the joy, for Persephone's suite of rooms – _the prettiest prison to grace under the earth_ – are empty, the door smashed open and singed like a burned and broken heart. If this is not odd enough, Hades himself is missing since evening the day before, along with his demon-bride.

The meeting of the gods was the day before; she, as a minor nymph, was not called to attend. But the lord was, and the queen, and she is bemused. Usually, after a gathering with the other gods, he calls upon her, the sweet Nepenthe and the inimitable Lethe to his bruised pride and wounded heart. For a moment she considers – no, of course not, never ever ever. The rogue thought slips up through her subconscious, a bleak image of two bodies entwined, in that duet only Fate has ever borne witness to. She dismisses it from her mind. Hades is Hades, and for as long as he has known him he has been as solid as the earth above and beneath her feet, as dependable as the rock on which his castle below the ground is built from. And he would never bed his queen.

Yet it is with some trepidation that she enters his suite of rooms. She has never been here before except on invitation from the lord/himself; he values his privacy almost as much as he once valued his queen. But he is absent, and the only person to be found is his wife, sitting calmly and quietly and oh-so sanely on his bed. The shivers race up and down Menthe's spine, a fierce blend of fear and passion, death and sex.

"Menthe," Persephone greets, her usually black-flame eyes a warm shade of honey and hazel, and she shudders to hear her name on the tongue of this woman, madness incarnate. "Are you looking for my husband?" On the delicate sharpness of the queen's voice, she receives every answer she ever needs. She does not need to ask to know what has occurred. The queen's glow is that of a woman who has been well pleased by a man, and Menthe feels a sudden surge of fear. There is something a little too sane about Persephone's eyes, an expression a little too calm resting on the goddess's beautiful features, when she is usually lit from within with the frantic glow of the truly deranged.

"I'll find him later," Menthe stammers, backing towards the door, desperate to escape. She is the prey, and the lioness is sharpening her claws. She is unsurprised when the heavy door slams shut, trapping her in the room with a madwoman. Persephone continues to smile pleasantly.

"No, you won't," she says, standing and moving towards the stricken nymph.

Menthe presses her lips together, biting down on them to hold her tongue, wanting nothing more than to be away from this woman, this nightmare vision of death. But the queen's eyes are living stone, stubbornness in every line of her willowy frame, and with something like resignation, she accepts that there will be no escape.

"You're something of a dilemma, Menthe," continues Persephone, shaking her head, as though the fate of the nymph is something that truly concerns her. "You really are. You see, my husband is very fond of you, as am I. I would say he is perhaps too fond of you. This is something of a problem."

Menthe says nothing. What is there to say? It is the truth – the lord loves her, but not as much as he loves his bride. Her heart burns.

"You understand, of course," says Persephone, her large eyes warm and gentle and so gods-damned sympathetic, "that I cannot let you live." And worst of all, she does understand, knew that the queen would never let her live so long as her husband's eyes still turned from her to another. There is no point in arguing. Persephone is not one to change her mind once it has been made up. "My husband and I have reconciled," continues the goddess. "He – nor I, I must confess – have any future use for you. And make no mistake," she adds, eyes narrowing and bending closer, "I will not have you ruin my marriage."

The lucidity, Menthe understands, is nothing more than a show, an act put on to fool those who do not know the queen into understanding her insanity. Persephone will never change; never become something more than the rigid, unbending monster she is now. And this is why she must die, why she must be erased from the face of the earth and beneath it, as though she never existed. For she could see the queen's state of mind, understand her in ways no one else ever could. The thought makes her body constrict and her soul shrivel – but, glancing down in horror, this is the work of the queen, standing, smiling, serene.

She cannot speak, cannot breathe, cannot do anything but melt into something not herself. The cage of her own flesh locks around her, a more restrictive cage than that of Persephone. As the barriers of what she was and what she will become begin to align in a dreadful kind of allegiance that she cannot fathom nor comprehend, she casts her eyes up to where she imagines the sky might be, above the castle beneath the ground.

_xx_

"Was Menthe here?" inquires Hades later, when her consciousness is dissolved and Persephone's witchery is done. "I think I smell her perfume." Persephone smiles at the window, to the solitary plant growing in the small plant pot.

"No, she wasn't," she replies, and turns back to her husband, a picture perfect woman with the heart of a snake.

_xx_

She watches, and she waits, and she dies eventually, a plant consumed by the ravages of age and the dislike of the queen. But the queen is still airy and light, a creature of artifice and sham and false beauty, and her beloved lord is still immovable and unchangeable as the earth that sustains her life. And they are together, and she is not.

But she is still a creature of change. For she is still the greenery that softens the harshness of the earth, and the gentle motion of her leaves creates wind that moves the air. Her seeds fly in this wind to the world above the castle beneath he ground, underneath the clouds of red and gold and violet that are created as the earth clashes with the sky.

When the nymph dies, imprisoned in a cage of mint scent and leafy softness, Persephone and Hades have fought and lived and loved in the room where she grows. Starved of the sun and of love and care, she rots from the inside out, her scent a sickly perfume that only the lord and the queen do not notice, too accustomed to care. She watched them for forever and a day, caught between worlds, locked in a kind of purgatory that never seemed to cease. Feasting her eyes on the glory – _horror_ – that is the lord and the queen, she is wordless and silent, a presence no longer herself, but no one else, either.

But for as long as she lived, through the agonies of disease and torment and the slow slide into forgetfulness for eternity, until she forgot even her own name and those of the two people she loved and loathed, she never forgot that earth and sky will always meet at the horizon.

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